


Messina Grove School For Young Ladies

by KLStarre



Category: Much Ado About Nothing - Shakespeare
Genre: Alternate Universe - Boarding School, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Drama, F/F, First Kiss, HAROLD THEY'RE LESBIANS, Matchmaking, School Dances
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-12
Updated: 2017-03-12
Packaged: 2018-10-03 06:47:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10238291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KLStarre/pseuds/KLStarre
Summary: Bea and Benny have been roommates for four years now, and they hate each other just as much now as they did when they first met.





	

**Author's Note:**

> There are some things here that don't perfectly match the canon, this was a kind of rushed school project

“Burn in hell,” Bea says, slamming the door behind her. _God_. It was days before school started at the Messina Grove School for Young Women, and she had hoped to have some peace and quiet before Benny returned to ruin her life. They were roommates, and had been since freshman year, but generally, they tried to avoid each other as much as possible. It’s just like her to void their unspoken agreement about who gets the room when, and, honestly, Bea doesn’t know how she’s going to make it through the year without killing someone.

            That someone being Benny.

            She collapses on her bed, which is small and cramped but, thankfully, not a bunk bed like she knows her cousin Hera has. School starts in three days, and this will probably be the only rest she gets until winter break. Might as well take advantage of it, she supposes, and before she knows it, she is asleep, dreaming happily of a time when she had never heard the name Benita.

            A pounding at the door awakens her, and, for a moment, she thinks it’s part of her dream. As she had slept, the sun had begun to set, and now, with the lights off, the room is filled with the dim quietude of early evening.

            Even with her eyes open, the knocking continues and so, annoyed, Bea stands and stretches before walking the five feet to the door and pulling it open without even bothering to check who’s outside. Standing there is Benny, looking beautiful and annoying, and the head of the school and Bea’s uncle, Principal Peter. Benny is laden down with suitcases, because apparently she’s just too good to live here for nine months without the entirety of the contents of her three wardrobes, and Principal John is the kind of angry that can easily give way to amusement.

            “What’s going on here?” Principal Peter asks, and Bea wishes she could punch Benny’s smug face.

            “I’m not sure what you mean, sir,” Bea responds, fighting the urge to roll her eyes.

            “What’s this about you not allowing your roommate to move in? Is there some sort of problem?”

            Benny opens her lipstick-lined mouth to speak, but before she can, Bea interjects. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir, I hadn’t even been informed of her arrival. I’ve been sleeping for the past few hours, perhaps I missed her knock.”

            “Maybe if you slept a little less often, you wouldn’t have failed your Physics Midterm last year,” Benny retorts, seemingly unable to control herself.

            “Ladies, ladies – ”

            “I didn’t fail, I got a B, which is better than you got on Statistics. Are you enjoying that D?”

            All last semester, there had been a longstanding rumor that Benny was sleeping with the math teacher, and, although it was probably untrue, it’s a source of endless amusement for Bea. Especially because, at the end of the day, Benny really had walked away with a 68 on the exam. Benny’s face turns red, and she looks like she’s about to start yelling, but Principal Peter finally manages to reassert himself. “Ladies, ladies!” he repeats. “I’m glad that we’ve gotten this all sorted out, then! Welcome back, you know where my office is if you have any questions.”

            With that, he turns and walks away, probably feeling like everything was settled and they would now become best of friends. He was wrong, of course. Benny and Bea stand there, frozen, Bea in the doorway and Benny looking like she would rather be literally anywhere else in the entire world. Bea watches Benny carefully, eyes sweeping over her body, it’s muscles honed from three years of ROTC, before finally stepping aside. She bows sardonically as Benny crosses the threshold, and steps carefully out of the way as Benny lets her million bags fall unceremoniously to the floor.

            Bea turns her back, rummaging through her single large suitcase for pajamas that she can use as an excuse to avoid going out, and as she extracts her favorite nightgown, she hears Benny collapse onto her bed. There is a space of less than six feet between their beds, so when Benny speaks, it sounds like she’s standing right there. “There,” she asks, “Was that so hard?”

            Instead of answering, Bea turns around, crosses her arms, and raises a single eyebrow. Benny chokes on silence.

∞

            It is a week and a half later, and the first week of school has nearly ended. Throughout the week, the only thing anyone has been talking about is the welcome back dance, the event that always sets the tone of the year to come. Rumors spread like Benny’s clothes across the entirety of her and Bea’s shared room – about who’s going with whom, what the theme will be, who’s DJ-ing, who will have broken up by the end of the night.

            This, at least, is one thing that Benny and Bea can agree about. “Are you going?” Benny asks Bea, the morning of, and she doesn’t have to specify where for Bea to know what she’s talking about.

            “Probably,” Bea replies, with a drawn out sigh as she struggles with her tangle of hair. Benny is still choosing an outfit, because for the first week they don’t have to wear their normal uniforms. Normally, Bea would be nagging her about it, but today they have a common enemy. “I don’t want to,” she continues, “But you know how it is. Rumor is Claudia is going to try to get with my cousin, so I have to be there to make sure she doesn’t hurt her, and if I miss it, I’m going to be behind on everything for at least the next two months.”

            “Here it is!” Benny exclaims, pulling out a skirt so tight it should be illegal. “Are you going with anyone, though?” she asks, and manages to disguise the hints of jealousy in her voice by struggling into the skirt.

            “Of course not,” Bea tosses over her shoulder, as she grabs her bag and steps out the door. “I don’t see the point. You know that.”

            With that, she leaves, leaving Benny alone in their dorm, with nothing but the sound of the whirring window AC for company.

∞

            At lunch, Hera places her tray next to Bea’s with a clatter, pulling a chair from an empty table nearby. “You will not _believe_ what just happened,” she says, rolling her eyes, and Bea looks up from her Calc BC homework to respond.

            “Why don’t you tell me?” she asks, even though she knows it’s unnecessary. Hera wouldn’t be sitting here if she weren’t planning on imparting some piece of what she considered to be crucial gossip. She has her own group of friends, attracted by her appearance, mostly, although some seem to genuinely like her, and when she steps down from her pedestal to speak to Bea, Bea usually can’t get a word in edgewise.

            “ _So_ ,” says, leaning in conspiratorially, “Dad pulled me aside earlier which is, like, so weird anyway, right? Like, Dad, you’re the principal, leave me alone. But, like, that’s not even the half of it. He pulls me into his _office_ so it looks like I’m in _trouble_ and then instead of telling me anything useful, he goes, like, ‘Hey, you know that girl Claudia?’ and I’m like ‘Yeah, dad, she’s your TA’ because, I mean, who _doesn’t_ know Claudia and then – you know what, I’m not going to tell you. Guess what he said next.”

            Bea has long ago returned to her math homework, twirling her pencil in her hair as she tries to focus, and so she has to go back mentally a couple of minutes in order to figure out what Hera’s asking. When she does, she rolls her eyes, and puts the pencil down with the annoyed air of someone who knows that she’s not going to get anything done anytime soon. “Did he, perchance, tell you that Claudia was going to ask you to the dance, and that you should say yes?”

            Hera glares. “Oh my god, how did you know? Did he tell you? Does _everyone_ but me know?”

            Bea tries to answer, but is immediately steamrollered over. “Never mind. Literally, how weird is that? Like, ew, dad, I can take care of my own dating life, thank you very much.”

            As Bea finishes her disgusted monologue, Claudia crosses in front of them, tall and soft and short-haired. They silence until she is out of ear short, and then Hera shrugs.

            “She is kind of cute, though, now that I think about it. What do you think?”

            Bea sighs, doing her best not to roll her eyes. Claudia _is_ cute, but that’s not the point. The point is that Hera doesn’t actually need her to respond, and will, definitely absolutely, be obsessed with Claudia by the time the dance comes around, in less than eight hours.

∞

            Bea and Benny arrive at the Welcome Back Dance forty-five minutes late, side-by-side but very aggressively not together. They haven’t spoken in an hour and a half, since Benny somehow lost Bea’s hair straightener in her room with an area of about ten square feet and then Bea had grabbed Benny’s diary and subsequently “lost” it in revenge.

            They were fuming as they shoved the doors open, together, and stepped into darkness that was pulsing with music that hadn’t been on the radio for at least two and a half years. The entire rest of the school, besides the stoners and the, like, four straight girls, was already here, and paired off into couples. As Bea and Benny shoved their way through the crowd to stand by the punch bowl, Bea catches sight of Claudia spinning Hera and then dipping her so low that her hair sweeps the ground.

            “This is so stupid!” Benny yells over the music, as soon as they stop moving, breaking the silence between them.

            “What?” shouts Bea back. “I can’t hear you!”

            “I said! This is so stupid!”

            “Oh!”

            They quiet again, and then Benny moves closer – ostensibly, so that she doesn’t have to yell. “Dating is such a waste of time. I’d rather die alone than deal with this nonsense,” she says, directly into Bea’s ear, and Bea is uncomfortably aware of how close they are, their sides pressed together, Benny’s lips by her hair.

            “Me too,” Bea agrees and then, because it’s getting too friendly, “Not that you have a choice. You’ll probably die alone no matter what you’d rather.”

            “Good thing I’ll have you to keep me company, then,” Benny retorts.

            “Dying young would be a blessing in comparison.” Bea grins, and then steps carefully away so that she doesn’t have to keep thinking about the warmth of Benny’s body.

∞

            Bea spends the rest of the weekend being bombarded by Hera with tales of Claudia – how _beautiful_ she is, and how _caring_ and how _strong_ and how she’s _sure_ that they’ll be married before they’re twenty. By the time Monday comes around, they’ve gone from barely talking to planning how they’re going to celebrate their first anniversary, and Bea is happy for her cousin, really she is, but she just knows that it’s all going to fall to pieces.

            Which is why when, the next day in her History of the African Continent class, Johanna passes her a note with “Claudia” written on the outside, she unfolds it without a second thought. She has to read it twice to be sure of what it says, and even then the words _Hera sucked Lea’s dick behind the gym last night_ don’t make any sense. First of all, Hera has literally been with Bea or Claudia for the past forty-eight hours straight, and second of all, everyone is about 99% sure that Lea doesn’t even like girls. She hadn’t been at the dance last night, there has yet to be any drama involving her dating someone – in the full three years that they’ve all been stuck together – and she wasn’t even on _Her._

            Besides, Johanna hates Claudia because she had wanted the TA position that Claudia got; why should she care if Claudia’s being theoretically cheated on?

            Bea waits until the teacher is turned to the board, drawing a timeline that is far more complex than it needs to be, and then balls up the note and throws it across the room into the trash can.

            “What did it say?” hisses Benny beside her, where she had been assigned to sit after literally everyone else in the class cheated off of her on at least one test each.

            “None of your business, asshat,” Bea responds, looking on in horror as the note bounces off the rim of the trashcan and rolls until it comes to a half-hearted stop beside Claudia. Claudia is bent over, taking notes, and for a moment, Bea dares to hope that she doesn’t notice the note. But then she picks up her pencil from her paper, placing it down carefully on the desk, and bends down to pick up the paper.

            Bea can feel Benny breathing down her neck as they both watch Claudia slowly, painstakingly, unfold it. They both watch the look of pain, and then anger, cross her face and, even though Benny has no idea what’s going on, she’s smart enough to realize that whatever it is, will not end well.

            The rest of the class passes in torturous discomfort, and Bea is the first one out of her seat when the bell rings, grabbing her phone from the phone bank at the front of class – it has a notification from an unknown number that she doesn’t bother checking - and running down the hall and out the door of the histories building to the building where Hera’s dorm is. It takes her a while to realize that Benny is just behind her, feet pounding in the same rhythm, but by the time they reach Hera’s door, they are neck and neck.

            Bea pushes it open without even bothering to knock, but she can tell immediately that she’s too late. Hera lies prostrate on the bottom bunk of the bed she shares, arm thrown dramatically across her eyes. “Is that you, Claudia?” she asks when the door creaks, not bothering to look.

            Bea and Benny exchange glances, forgetting for a moment that they’re supposed to hate each other, and then sit down on the edges of the bed, twisting their upper bodies to face Hera.

            “No,” Bea says. “It’s me. Me and – and Benny.”

            “Oh,” Hera says, disappointed, moving her arm slightly so that she can see. Her eyes are red and puffy, and it hits Bea with a rush that, although she may be overdramatic, she is honestly upset. “Claudia _broke up_ with me,” she says, and Benny opens her mouth to say something but is immediately silenced by a glare from Bea.

            “I know,” Bea says, knowing that Hera is not done talking, or even close.

            “She _broke up_ with me. She said I’d cheated on her! I’ve been with her, or with _you_ ever since we got together! It’s only been, like, three days! _When_ would I have had the time to do whatever it is she thinks I did! She asked me who the other girl was, and I said I had no idea, and this is all over text, mind you, so, like, what am I supposed to do when she stops responding? I’m not going to _call_ her, then I’ll just look desperate!”

            “Call her,” Bea says.

            “Don’t,” Benny says. “I’ll talk to her. She was in ROTC last year before she decided to focus on soccer. We’re not super close, but she trusts me.”

            Bea looks at Benny with newfound respect, but is prevented from saying anything by Hera.

            “Thank you,” she says, startled into being genuine, and then, as if to make up for it, “But until then, tell everyone I’m dead! It would be less embarrassing!”

            “Whatever you want,” Bea says, rolling her eyes, and Hera smiles contentedly.

∞

            It’s not until that night that Bea checks her phone, finally, as she lies in bed listening to Benny’s gentle breathing across the room. She doesn’t know the number, although it does have the same weird area code as her uncle, so she is prepared for the text to just be spam, but when she opens it, her stomach freezes. _Benny likes you,_ it reads, and it takes a while for her to get past that first line. _I promise, this is not a joke. She thinks you’re smart and funny and beautiful, and has since she met you. Meet me in the old science lab tomorrow morning, and I’ll tell you how I know._

            Well. That’s…that’s certainly something.

∞

            Bea wakes up and finds that, completely independent of her own common sense, her brain has determined while she slept that she would, in fact, be following the instructions from her mysterious texter. It’s a terrible idea.

            An absolutely horrific one, in fact.

            But she looks over at Benny, and sees her hair splayed over her face, and honestly? Benny is beautiful. And, despite how strangely terrible she is at Statistics, she’s smart. And she makes Bea laugh, and is one of the few people that Bea knows for sure doesn’t talk about her behind her back.

            So. Maybe she’s just curious. But maybe it’s something more.

∞

            The science room is cold and empty, the old fluorescent lights casting an unpleasant yellow sheen over everything. Bea seats herself at one of the stools set up at one of the lab tables, and feels like she’s doing something illegal.

            She sits there for ten minutes, jumping at every little noise, checking her phone like it’s a lifeline, and there’s nothing. The clock is moving ever closer to breakfast time, and eventually, with a sigh, Bea stands up and walks to the door. She had been hoping to learn something, of course, but breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and she wouldn’t be surprised if the whole thing were just a prank.

            But, as she turns the knob to leave, the door is pulled open from the other side, and she comes face to face with Benny.

            “What are you doing here?” Bea asks, immediately defensive, and Benny rolls her eyes.

            “I could ask you the same question. _I’m_ supposed to be meeting someone.”

“Wait, did you send that text?”

            Benny doesn’t say anything for a long moment. And then – “Wait. _You_ got that text too?”

            Bea steps back, allowing Benny to join in the science room, and then pulls out her phone, showing the text to Benny. “This one?” she asks.

            “Yeah. Or, well, very similar. Names switched.”

            “Oh.”

            They stare at each other, and Bea realizes that the drop in her stomach is disappointment.

            “So, it’s not true, then?” Bea asks.

            “No,” says Benny, quickly, far more quickly than would be natural. “Unless…I mean, unless you, like, want it to be.”

            They stare at each other some more, because that seems to be the only thing that they’re capable of doing, right about now.

            And then – Bea’s not sure what makes her do it. Maybe she’s tired, or stressed, or maybe Benny just looks more human than usual, with her hair tousled with sleep and dark circles under her eyes. Whatever it is, she steps forward. Whatever it is, Benny mirrors her.

            They are so close now that all one of them would have to is lean forward, and they would be kissing.

            Benny leans forward.

            And they are kissing.

           


End file.
